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The best approach is always the one that give your members the best user experience.

I would leave the content they have created as it is, but disable it. Meaning that the user can not access it before they have upgraded their account again.

Of course it depends on what you are offering your members, but it is normal to at least give a member a few months to re-enable their subscription or in your case upgrade the subscription before removing the data.

You would need to decide on how long you let the data stay there, if the members content does not take that much space I would just let it stay forever. After all the members experience would be great if he re-enable his higher subscription a year down the road and still find his information.

Well said TheRedDevil. People downgrade for various reasons... making it a good experience is how you stop them from leaving all together. Depending on what you offer, you could let them keep their existing items but limit adding anything further until they drop below the threshold or if you want to be more aggressive, restrict them from making edits until they mark enough items inactive to be within the plan. This way they don't have to remove them and don't lose their site but at the same time have an incentive to go back up if they have the need for more than the downgraded account offers. The idea is to make it clear there's value in being at a higher level but not so hard a transition that they'd be better of canceling and signing up again (or going elsewhere).

I like the way 37 Signals handles this in Backpack. When I went to downgrade my account that had too many pages, the plans page showed all the plans but the option to downgrade was greyed out.

It would not let me downgrade until I removed some pages. Below the plans it even told me I had too many to downgrade.

I like this because for 37 Signals, it keeps things simple. It makes sure they're not paying for disk usage on lots of stuff people aren't paying for. Let them have an easy way to export their data, and make them lower their resources if they wan to downgrade to a lesser plan.

I like the way 37 Signals handles this in Backpack. When I went to downgrade my account that had too many pages, the plans page showed all the plans but the option to downgrade was greyed out.

It would not let me downgrade until I removed some pages. Below the plans it even told me I had too many to downgrade.

I like this because for 37 Signals, it keeps things simple. It makes sure they're not paying for disk usage on lots of stuff people aren't paying for. Let them have an easy way to export their data, and make them lower their resources if they wan to downgrade to a lesser plan.

On the surface it makes sense, but what if the restrictions run a little deeper? For example, a project in basecamp maybe a plan gives you:

So, if you want to do the "grey out" route, you would need to sort of analyze every item in their account and search for "violations" - which is certainly doable.. just wonder if it's the best way to do it...